Having a ball: Celebrating Spokane’s connections to hoops with a giant wooden basketball
“Trial and error, hard work and rocket science,” says Steve Ferse about the giant wooden basketball he built in his home shop in Spokane on March 25. The project took about five years, was made out of alder and weighs about 65 pounds (Kathy Plonka/The Spokesman-Review)
Five years in the making and finished just in time for the Final Four, Steve Ferse’s masterpiece is something to behold.
Weighing 65 pounds, and spanning 3½ feet across with a circumference of 11 feet, his giant wooden basketball is 4½ times larger than a regulation ball.
The idea came to him while on a stroll.
“I was walking around Corbin Park and thinking about how important basketball is in Spokane,” he said. “Hooptown, Hoopfest and Gonzaga.”
He’d moved to the city in 2016 and planned to build a shop/garage to replace an existing structure.
“It was a 100-year-old one-car garage,” he said.
With that project completed, he began work on the big ball in 2020, using a design he created.
“I doubt that anyone has ever done this,” Ferse said. “I looked online.”
His first attempt caught nothing but air.
“I started with cedar and found out I was allergic to it.”
Ferse settled on alder.
“It’s not a real hard wood and it’s easier to stain,” he said.
Though he owned most of the needed tools, each step of the process required innovation.
“I thought it would be much easier than it turned out to be,” he said.
He built a plywood bend station, where he carefully shaped each section.
“I glued six one-eighth -inch thick boards together,” he said. “It took trial and error. A lot of things didn’t work.”
While his process and design are proprietary, Ferse said he couldn’t have accomplished it without a boat winch.
“This is why it took several years,” he said. “I had to figure out each step and create each station.”
He spent hours sanding the sphere with a hand block and used a die grinder to create the grooves for the black lines that arc across the ball.
The project generated 600 pounds of dust that Ferse donated to a horse farm.
When the time came to paint it, he wanted to ensure the color would be authentic.
“I took a basketball down to Benjamin Moore and they mixed it for me.”
The orange oil-based stain proved a perfect match.
Friends helped him lift the ball onto an aluminum base rimmed with rubber edges.
When the last coat of the three coats of finish dried, Ferse was ready for the reveal.
“I had an Open Ball instead of an Open House,” he said.
The big basketball is for sale, and he hopes it finds a home at Gonzaga University, or perhaps a former Zag or NBA player might be interested.
What does it take to make a slam dunk of this magnitude?
“Hard work, patience, attention to detail and rocket science,” Ferse said.
Though he has enough lumber to build two more basketballs, he’s pondering a new project.
“It’s golf season,” he said. “I might do a golf ball next.”
With his workstations in place and the skills he learned the first time around, there’s no doubt his next venture will be a hole-in-one.
For him, the most satisfying part of the process was seeing his idea come to life.
“I also enjoyed the constant mental engagement and the challenge of trying to improve the process,” Ferse said. “And being in my shop and working with wood is always a pleasure.”